Jagged Alliance 3

For core ttRPG and Squad tactics fans I would recommend this game without hesitation. I would say this game qualifies for the tag "criminally overlooked". On the other hand I think I understand why it's been criminally overlooked, it does have some pretty major flaws and problems which I'll comment on below. First the reasons why you should definitely consider playing it: 1. The combat systems are excellent, close to best in class, Interesting, meaty, knife edged, exiting and ultimately very satisfying. 2. Unlike may ttRPGs/Squad Tactics games this one has a pretty interesting story with many twists and turns, plenty of C&C sprinkled with a number of interesting side quests and mysteries to enjoy. This gives you a reason to explore and a reason to go fight people, a context for the excellent combat. 3. You have a large selection of larger than life and sometimes very amusing mercs to choose from and you will meet a number of equally larger than life, sometimes very funny and sometimes despicable NPCs. The game does not take itself too seriously (except regarding the combat and your merc builds and equipment), it's meant to be entertaining and it is. Plenty of laughs after the fighting's done. 4. The main plot quests and many side quests are laid out with stages and clues spread right across the main map and there is minimal hand holding. It the opposite of a Skyrim style "go to map marker, kill A, grab B, deliver it to C" type thing. It's more like "Somethings up somewhere sort of around there, might be interesting, maybe we should take a look". This gives you a good reason to explore and it also gives you lots of options and questions about what you should/shouldn't do next. It also means you will get a lot of surprises. 5. Further to the way the plot and quests are constructed, on a first playthrough it is almost impossible to predict "best outcomes" (whatever you're own idea of a best outcome might be) and there are many alternative outcomes to many of the quests. This leads to replayability. 6. Further to replayability, there is also a wide range of mercs to choose from for your team who have very different characteristics, abilities and personalities. This leads to a wide variety of equally viable playstyles from stealth sniper to full on Rambo and everything in between. Turning to the games problems and the reasons why I think this game hasn't reached to audience it should have done: 1. The beginning of the game, "tutorial Island" as it's known, is more akin to a baptism of fire than a gentle introduction to game's unusual and unfamiliar mechanics. It is brutally difficult compared to what you will face immediately after completing it. The difficulty of tutorial island associated with these unfamiliar mechanics is significantly increased by your starter mercs being useless at that stage, unable to hit a barn door at 10 paces basically. I'm sure the devs did this deliberately on the grounds that once you'd figured out how to beat tutorial island you'd be well set to get into the meat of the game. In this I can say they absolutely succeeded. however the problem is the game doesn't tell you that, it just plunges you in at the deep end. I have two friends who own JA3, neither of them have more than 10 hours in it, i.e. they gave up on tutorial island. I understand why. If you have a crack at JA3 I strongly recommend you power through tutorial island, it will pay off hand over fist. The game provides players with a fantastic safety net of clearly marked auto-saves so you can always recover from any sort of disaster without losing any play time to speak of. 2. Controversially JA3 does not give % chance To Hit numbers. Instead it gives a number vague indicators from which you can evaluate the likely wisdom or otherwise of a shot. Once you learn how of course. For me I found this really hard to deal with on tutorial island, by mid-game I had far less difficulty interpreting it and by end-game I was was completely comfortable with the system (although of course by that time my mercs could hit a mouse on the moon anyway). I recommend you don't stress this and treat it for what it is: a slice of realism designed to teach you to be careful, avoid recklessness and remember to "train hard, fight easy". 3. The economy of this game is weird and extremely difficult to come to terms with. Like Battle Brothers and Wartales etc you have to pay your mercs a substantial daily wage. Unlike BB and Wartales you don't get paid for missions nor can you sell loot (mostly), you only get serious money from capturing and keeping control of diamond mines. This is complicated but the TL;DR of it is for at least half of your first game you will be utterly confused by the game economy and be absolutely terrified of running out of money and facing game over. For good reason, this is actually a genuine possibility, You salvation lies in understanding that controlling more diamond mines is better than controlling less diamond mines. Simple as that really. Certainly on normal difficulty, so long as you remember that and act accordingly you really won't have any money issues. I had two full teams, including several super-expensive mercs, and still had nearly $3m in the bank by the end of the game. 4. The inventory management system in JA3 is awful. It shoots for realism, a merc can only carry so much in their backpack, you do not have a pack horse to carry a party stash etc, but the problem is this leads to endless messing about with inventory micro-management. In the early game this is immersive and very much part of interesting gameplay. By mid-game and beyond it becomes tedious, repetitive and annoying. It also tends to limit the number of available toys you can play with in combat. Things which are situationally useful, such as explosives and smoke grenades, have to go in favour of weaponry that is always handy to have available. For example a 12-guage shotgun blast in the face is always effective in a tight spot at close quarters no matter what. 5. I said a bove that a big plus in JA3 is that the quests are complicated, mysterious and tend to have stages spread out all over the map that take significant exploration and in some cases require some courage to resolve. However there is a downside to this in the way it has been implemented. Because the big bads in the game are constantly sending groups to attack your assets and you can't be in two places at once (especially before you can afford to hire a second group of mercs), and because there can be significant distances between the locations of quest stages (and you often don't even know where they are) you can't easily resolve quests one at a time and their resolution tends to get spread over many hours. The effect of this is that you lose the thread of narrative and therefore can lose engagement with the story lines. IMHO the main culprit for this what passes for the game's journal (called "notes"). It is terse, sometimes deliberately misleading, often opaque. It is very hard sometimes to pick up the thread of a quest narrative and the characters involved and re-engage with it. I think if the devs had put a lot more work into making the journal read more like a story and less like an incomprehensible list of technical quest stage descriptors it would have made JA3 much more accessible and enjoyable to more players. Anyways, if you like games like Battle Brothers, Wartales, XCOM etc then I highly recommend JA3 for the outstanding squad tactics gameplay alone. The humour, the story lines, the exploration and the characters add even more notwithstanding the issues with some of that.

just finished the campaign. absolutely loved this game. yes, JA2 is still superior and a timeless masterpiece, but JA3 still captured me throughout the campaign in a way I wasn't expecting. the setting is the weakest aspect, gran chien doesn't really feel very lived in like alruco and is more of an excuse for wacky mercenary adventures - they're still fun, but part of JA is balancing the gritty horrors of war with the colorful weirdos you hire. but that's about the worst I can say, everything else was very, very enjoyable. the gameplay is right on the perfect level of tactical depth and accessibility with plenty of options to really leverage good planning into an advantage. there are some clunky elements in the UI but for the vast majority of the time, it works well enough. now man I gotta make a note for the mercs themselves. the series is best known for absurd level of care and resources dedicated to bringing them to life and this game didn't hold back either; I've got so many quotes and callouts stuck in my head I'll probably keep blurting them out for years to come. by the ending, when everyone says their last goodbyes, that ♥♥♥♥ hit me like a brick, you really get attached to them. their banter, unique dialogue, abilities - everything masterfully written and acted in a way that really brings the characters to life and you just want the adventure to keep on going to hear more of what they have to say. anyway, I had an absolute blast playing this game, and I'm gonna miss it. play jagged alliance 3, you won't regret it.

As soon as I started playing and went to create my merc in IMP, I noticed the game’s terrible writing. I call it Marvel-style writing. Cringy, not funny, but trying forcefully to be funny. Then I saw the ugly premade characters that could be my avatars in the game. After that, I saw the butchered original characters in AIM. They lost their cool. They look stuck between a Fortnite-like look and wannabe-gritty. I call it “modern design”. Finally, I started to play. I have to say that I like the new skills added to the game, or the stealth mode. But then I see the characters interact and speak, and I lose the magic for me. I am completely removed from my merc fantasy and into a Marvel-like re-edition of JA. Not my kind of game.

The game looks good, sound is fine, the game mechanics seem like a mix of new-xcom and old JA2 gameplay, and those are among my favorite games, so no complaints there. But why is every merc, villain, and character in the game something you would find in a saturday morning cartoon, and not even a good one? A good story and characters add to the game, but if it is just ok and on the background, it is fine too. But this is very jarring and annoying. It's a war. There's a mass grave on the third map. And I am hearing Igor spout dialogue like an excited eight-year old boy as he murders people. All characters in fact, sound like they came out of Dora the Explorer or something like that. Even more puzzly, is that the audince for this game is old. There are no children playing this, JA2 came out in 1999, for christ's sake. Who in their right mind decided this? Other than that, the UI is atrocious. It is TERRIBLE, and still it is not my main complaint about the game. Huge missed opportunity, gameplay does not seem half bad.

说实话，游戏做的非常认真，关卡很巧妙。但是这个概率让我觉得并不好玩，敌人打我命中几乎都是百分之百。但是我的策略极好了，却打一个敌人经常不命中，不命中，而且还是很贵很贵的老兵。你想想一个经验丰富的老兵，移动到极好的位置，却打一个新兵蛋子民兵都好多枪打不中，打不中了敌人数量还比你多那么多，你该怎么办？一次又一次的读档，让你在读档里找到一丝幸运。这游戏完全不是策略游戏，就是个概率游戏，这样的话何必搞老兵，都是新兵的话我就能接受打不中，但是我重开几次游戏都是这样，老兵打不中人。 我 感觉非常沮丧。所以永别了。

Peak Tactical Grid Fighter. I think the whole combat system is superior even compared to the best in the genre. This should get at least the fame X-COM has, and i love X-COM

I purchased this for around £12... and it's still too much. Truth be told, prior to playing the JA3 I didn't expect that the series can be even further dumbed down since Back in Action. I was wrong. - This game is streamlined down to a level of a cheap mobile game. The devs didn't even trust us with ammunition management. No mags. No carrying gear. Three equipment slots. Two hands with backups. Magical "squad inventory". - The dialogue and prompts are 10/10 on cringe scale. The voice actors don't know what they're doing - Gontarski sounds like a German, Grizzly fakes a tough voice, Thor speaks with unidentified broad English accent? Upscaling and copying JA2 audio files would have been so much better, especially when all the one-liners are Marvel-level crap. - Graphics is okay-ish, but the gear you put on your mercs doesn't appear on their model. The animations are on early 2000's level. - The AP system is an unholy amalgamation of standard large-AP pool TB and X-Com-esque 1-move + 1-action. Which gives some tactical flexibility, but due to absolutely horrendously low accuracy and damage, the nuance is quickly lost. - Enemies are bullet sponges. And they of course get a free movement turn when engaged. Refunded with glee. Go play JA2 v.1.13 or even the unfinished and buggy 7.62 (Hard Life or Blue Sun) - it's miles above and beyond this.

I'm finding the actual gameplay very clumsy. Lots of bling, but basic things don't work very well, and I'm not having much fun in the tactical missions because the game makes it very hard to understand and control the situation. Edit: After finishing the game, I like it even less. I got every single bad ending, which feels like a kick in the gut after putting in 50 hours doing tedious mini quests with undisclosed time limits. The combat wasn't much fun, and the logistics in the overmap was pretty painful too. There were always 5 things happening at once, travelling anywhere was very slow and gave opportunity for another 5 things to happen, and trying to finish any of the time limited quests would invariably trigger another time limited quest half way through through the first one, making success improbable. Even as someone with unlimited free time, I didn't really enjoy this. It did do the world building and art pretty well though. Just the actual gameplay can't compete with Phoenix Point and Terror From The Deep.

Good graphics, disappointing tactics. Jagged Alliance 3 looks good, has plenty of content and clearly had a lot of effort put into it. BUT unfortunately, it misses what I do personally expect from a tactical game: rewarding good planning. If I spend time scouting, positioning my mercs and preparing the perfect ambush, I should be able to wipe out an unprepared camp. Instead, you get one surprise shot and then everyone magically starts running around, even with the mercs in position one holding knife on throat. I really do not understand the underlying design here; if the developers don't want planning to solve battles, maybe this wasn't the right genre to limit it. The enemy AI also breaks immersion. In one mission, enemies literally watched mines explode... then happily ran through the same minefield themselves. A real squad would hold position, suppress, flank or retreat. Instead, I'm leading an idiot squad to eliminate another idiot squad. And the continuous battle that is neverending, UI constantly fought against me too. Camera angles, mouse controls and basic actions like healing never felt intuitive. Even the mercs are idiots, do the UI have to be one too? Finally, the constant macho one-liners became more annoying than funny. I don't mind cheesy 80's action movie vibes, but the mercs never seem to stop interrupting the gameplay. The magic is not there... I still think Jagged Alliance: Back in Action had the better tactical concept with its Plan & Go system. One day I'd love to see a modern Jagged Alliance that rewards planning instead of forcing every battle into the same turn-based firefight. Guerrilla mercenaries aren't gentlemen. They don't pop up after the first visual contact saying: "Aha! You spotted us! Let's all politely run to random cover, wait while commander wrestles with the UI, and then take turns fighting fair and square."

Это вообще не джагга. И это никакая не тактика. Какая-то примитивная мультяшная херь. Интерфейс явто точился под консоли. Визуальный стиль отстой. У меня ощущение что современные игры делают для умственно отсталых. Между этой игрой и старыми добрыми JA2 и Fallout 1-2 нескончаемая пропасть.